The present invention, in general, relates to the information processing technology, and more particularly, relates to a message hub apparatus, a program, and a method for efficiently processing service processing messages.
Recently, SOA (service oriented architecture) has rapidly spread as a design technique of an information system, which causes a plurality of services to cooperate with each other using integration technology of an industry standard. According to the SOA, after extracting service units, for example, “inventory management”, “credit processing”, and “delivery processing”, from a business process, it can flexibly constitute an enterprise system which encompasses the whole business process, such as a “sales management system”, an “order receiving system”, and a “production management system”, by causing the service units to cooperate with each other.
A typical example of an implementation form of the enterprise system according to such SOA can include the form in which a hub layer is provided between a process service layer for managing the whole business process and a service layer for actually providing the respective extracted services.
A message hub apparatus provided in the hub layer receives service processing messages (for example, requests for invoking or canceling service processings) from a service requester arranged in the process service layer, arranges the messages in a message queue, and then transfers the messages to a service provider arranged in the service layer. The service provider then processes the transferred messages and returns the processing results to the service requester.
Since the increase in the service processing amount in the service provider leads to the increase in required computer resources, it is preferred for the service provider that the service processing amount is reduced in order to reduce investment for the computer resources. It is also preferred for the service requester that the service processing amount is reduced in order to reduce charge from the service provider. Accordingly, it is understood that it is useful to optimize the service processing messages stored in the message queue in the message hub apparatus so that the processing amount in the service provider is reduced.
In addition, as the background art relevant to the queuing technique, Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication (Kokai) No. 2001-160014 discloses a queuing method for reducing data to be registered in a queue by, when certain data is to be registered in the queue, searching whether or not the data mergeable with the certain data has been registered in the queue, and, if the data mergeable with the data to be registered in the queue by a program for performing data transmission has already been registered in the queue, merging the data with each other.